Keith Gessen at the New Yorker interviews a number of scholars who study how wars end. The article is lengthy and provides lots of interesting frames for analyzing the war in Ukraine. I thought this was interesting:
The other factor that had been ignored in the literature, according to [Hein] Goemans, was domestic politics. States were considered unitary actors with set interests, but this left out the internal pressures placed on the government of a modern nation-state. Goemans created a data set of every leader of every war-fighting country between 1816 and 1995, and coded each according to a tripartite system. Some leaders were democrats; some were dictators; and some were in between. According to Goemans, democrats tended to respond to the information delivered by the war and act accordingly; at the very worst, if they lost the war but their country still existed, they would get turned out of office and go on a book tour. Dictators, because they had total control of their domestic audience, could also end wars when they needed to. After the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was such a leader; he simply killed anyone who criticized him. The trouble, Goemans found, lay with the leaders who were neither democrats nor dictators: because they were repressive, they often met with bad ends, but because they were not repressive enough, they had to think about public opinion and whether it was turning on them. These leaders, Goemans found, would be tempted to “gamble for resurrection,” to continue prosecuting the war, often at greater and greater intensity, because anything short of victory could mean their own exile or death. He reminded me that on November 17, 1914—four months after the First World War began—Kaiser Wilhelm II met with his war cabinet and concluded that the war was unwinnable. “Still, they fought on for another four years,” Goemans said. “And the reason was that they knew that if they lost they would be overthrown, there would be a revolution.” And they were right. Leaders like these were very dangerous. According to Goemans, they were the reason that the First World War, and many others, had dragged on much longer than they should have.
Unfortunately, Putin fits into this dangerous category of someone who lacks democratic legitimacy but cannot simply control public opinion in his nation. I would guess that Zelensky falls into another category, where he has democratic legitimacy in Ukraine but lacks a monopoly of force in the state; certain militias can do as they please.
But the disquieting part of this article is that, much like me, an amateur watcher, the scholars have trouble seeing how the war will end at all. They see clearly how it could escalate, how even Ukrainian advances could trap Putin into a corner where a nuclear strike may appear to be his best gamble. Both nations and their governments have extremely compelling reasons to stick to their aims, and compelling reasons not to back down. For Ukraine, of course, it is the survival of their nation-state as they know it. And for Russia it may be the survival of their government, and the avoidance of another period of intense chaos, and declining standards of living, as many remember from the 1990s.